LA County finishes moving juvenile halls to Downey ahead of state shutdown

Los Angeles County has moved the last of its youth detainees to the newly reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, marking the end of a months-long scramble to clear out the county’s troubled juvenile halls before a state ordered shutdown of those facilities later this month.

The county Probation Department transferred 277 predisposition youth and hundreds of staff to the 26-acre campus in Downey over the course of roughly a week. Central Juvenile Hall near Lincoln Heights was the first to empty, with the last of the 171 youth from that facility moving to Los Padrinos on July 14. Four days later, the department relocated 106 youth from Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar to the new consolidated juvenile hall.

Officials hope consolidating the juvenile hall operations at a single facility will stabilize the ongoing staffing crisis responsible for the poor conditions that drove the state to deem Barry J. Nidorf and Central “unsuitable” for use in May. The state regulatory board ordered both facilities to be shut down by July 23.

In a statement, interim Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa applauded the efforts of his department and the other county agencies to accomplish the full relocation of two juvenile halls over the course of a little more than two months. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved Viera Rosa’s plan for the consolidation at Los Padrinos back in May. The supervisors promoted Viera Rosa, who was hired in April, to the top of the department just days later, following the sudden resignation of his predecessor.

Los Padrinos passed a state inspection and was given the green light to start moving youth on July 7.

‘Mission accomplished’

“We’ve gone from Mission Impossible to mission accomplished,” Viera Rosa stated. “The relocation of nearly 300 predisposition youth safely and in record time demonstrates what public servants across many L.A. County departments can do when everyone pulls together in the face of daunting odds.”

Janice Hahn, chair of the Board of Supervisors, described the reopening under such a tight deadline as a “mammoth undertaking” and expressed her gratitude for the county employees, who worked overtime to prepare the facility over the past two months, and for the city of Downey, which “understood the necessity of reopening this facility they had thought was closed for good.”

“A new facility alone doesn’t mean that challenges are behind us, but it is an opportunity for a fresh start and one we need to take advantage of,” Hahn said. “We are going to need to stay vigilant and make sure the problems we had at other facilities are not carried over to Los Padrinos.”

Helps with staffing crisis

Los Padrinos, originally opened in 1957, consists of 37 buildings, 19 living units and nine dormitories; however, only about nine of the living units will be used at this time, according to the county.

“Consolidating juvenile detention at Los Padrinos is also going to help with staffing shortages, but the Board of Supervisors has given the go-ahead to hire as many probation officers as needed to make sure this facility is safe both for the young people as well as the staff who work there every day,” Hahn said.

More than 360 full-duty officers will be reassigned to Los Padrinos, while another 116 will move to the Secure Youth Treatment Facility that will remain at Barry J. Nidorf. The department hopes to bolster those numbers by adding 300 new recruits to the two facilities by 2024.

The SYTF at Barry J. Nidorf is a separate unit that houses older, more serious offenders who were returned to county custody following the dissolution of California’s Division of Juvenile Justice. It was not included in the state’s shutdown order due to an oversight in state law.

Though it will not house youth regularly, L.A. County wants to also continue using Central Juvenile Hall to provide medical services for the other two facilities, at least until the county can finish additional renovations necessary to add those services to Los Padrinos instead.

Call-outs have domino effect

The county has struggled to appropriately staff its juvenile halls for more than a year due, in large part, to employees not showing up for work. A large number of call-outs created essentially a domino effect, in which employees feel unsafe in understaffed units and, in turn, call out, too. This has led to youth missing school and getting less time outdoors, and contributed to the spread of drugs and other contraband throughout the facilities.

Since March, the juvenile halls have experienced at least eight hospitalizations for drug use, including a fatal overdose in May. The county has pledged to step up security at Los Padrinos, with officials saying they are investigating installing airport-style scanners at the entrances to the facility.

“Working with our hardworking probation officers, we need to have zero tolerance for drugs getting into our facility and that means searching every person and package entering Los Padrinos,” Hahn said.

On top of preventing drugs from entering the facility, Hahn said youth with substance addiction issues should also “get the treatment they need at Los Padrinos.”

So far, there hasn’t been any sign that the staffing crisis is lessening, though officials hope the consolidation will start a turnaround.

Deanna Carlisle, the department’s human resources manager, stated at a recent Probation Oversight Commission meeting that while a typical public agency may see 10% to 15% of its staff out at on leave, nearly a third of the employees for the juvenile halls are on “full-time leave.”

“What we see here sometimes is up to 50%,” Carlisle said at the time.

In May, just 66% of employees showed up at Nidorf, a number that Carlisle said would have been worse if other employees hadn’t worked longer shifts or stepped up to fill in where needed.

In his announcement, Viera Rosa thanked his staff for their extra efforts and said it was fitting that the move to Los Padrinos was completed during Probation Services Week.

“In our juvenile operations alone,” Viera Rosa said, “we’ve had many officers and staff that have gone above and beyond the call of duty working double shifts and overtime to keep things running until we could marshal the resources and political will to make this important institutional pivot.”